Body outlines (Watch this space)

16 August 2025

The chalked outline of a corpse is a crime fiction cliché. It is seldom used in real police investigations and yet the image has been assimilated into our everyday visual vocabulary. Advertisers, illustrators and safety authorities have appropriated the familiar shape to encapsulate their warnings about crime and violence. In Sydney’s inner west, young professionals are gradually replacing the students, activists and artists living in what used to be cheap accommodation there. But as I photograph the increasingly upmarket streets of Newtown, I find that graffitists still use its pavements to broadcast their protest messages and sometimes they make their point by filling in the blank forms of body outlines.

(This article was originally published in 2009 the first issue of Second Nature: International journal of creative media, produced by the School of Creative Media at RMIT. It was meant to be the first in a series of essays examining the pavement as a medium of expression. Unfortunately Second Nature did not continue and even that first issue is no longer available on-line.

As a blog post it fails miserably according to WordPress – it has too many long words, long sentences and long paragraphs, too much passive voice, and not enough subheadings. Surprisingly WordPress does not mention that the content is a little dated even though it is. Fortunately I am not trying to sell anything and I hope my literate readers enjoy the post despite these failings.)

IT LOOKED AS IF THERE HAD BEEN A MASSACRE – the position of several corpses had been marked with outlines on the footpath near the railway station. It wasn’t the first time this sort of thing had happened in the area. I had seen crime-scene outlines on Newtown pavements about fifteen years before. I have seen them intermittently since then and these days I photograph them to preserve some permanent record of their existence. Chalked bodies fade quickly under the assault of passing feet; spray-painted versions last longer, but eventually these disappear as well. Newtown being the sort of place it is, they are inevitably replaced by fresh ones sooner or later.

As it turned out, this latest batch of outlines was evidence of a series of homicides that had happened, not here in Sydney’s inner west, but nearly 1000 km away. Recreated homicides, actually. The drawings were part of an outdoor marketing campaign for the 2008 television series Underbelly – a fictionalized memorial to Melbourne’s 10 year ‘gangland war’.

On the other hand, those first body outlines I had seen in Newtown many years previously were commemorating a different kind of wartime event – the bombing of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. Every year peace activists around the world observe Hiroshima Day by holding rallies, and sometimes they draw bodies on their local pavements. These are supposed to simulate the marks left when people were vapourised by the bomb’s heat blast. Judging from the few photographs taken in Hiroshima that day, the real body shadows were blurred and formless, and yet it is the clichéd homicide silhouette that activists have chosen to use in their peace demonstrations. The outlines make the street look like a crime scene, and for anti-war protesters that is the point.

Newtown has a high rate of metaphorical crime. Body outlines are pressed into service for all sorts of causes.

In peace protests their manifestation is not limited to 6 August. There was, for example, a spray-paint installation that appeared in Goddard Street early in 2003, when Australia joined the war in Iraq. ‘NO WAR’, written in huge letters on the side wall of a café, was accompanied by a slew of life-size figures on the footpath. Their stark remains decorated the asphalt in that tiny side street for several years.

Around the corner, in the main street of Newtown, synthetic bluestone pavers are gradually replacing the asphalt footpaths, just as young professionals in renovated properties are gradually replacing the inner-city students, activists and artists living in what used to be cheap accommodation in the area. But despite the upward mobilization of Newtown, pockets of resistance still exist, from old leftie Bob Gould in his chaotic book arcade at one end of King Street, to young anarchists in crusty flats above the shops at the other. And although the gritty monochrome of old asphalt was more suitable for inscriptions in chalk and paint, protesters still manage to use the footpaths of King Street as a billboard for their messages, defying the unfriendliness of the new pavers’ neatly repetitive grooves and shiny mottled surfaces.

Take, for instance, the trail of crime-scene outlines that I photographed in September 2005. These marked the progress of a mobile street performance by students belonging to an anti-capitalist collective called 30A. Suited ‘capitalists’ had rolled a giant gold coin along the footpath in King Street, mowing down ‘workers’ as they went. Shapes were traced around the ‘victims’ and the space inside the outlines was filled with slogans like ‘Howard kills jobs’, and ‘Work is death’. It was all pre-publicity for a mass protest to be held later that week, not in Newtown, but outside the Forbes Global CEO Conference at Sydney Opera House.

Newtown often acts as outrider for demonstrations happening elsewhere.

This explains another outbreak of body outlines in King Street in February 2004 – it coincided with a riot in Redfern a few kilometres away. Anti-police violence had erupted after Aboriginal teenager TJ Hickey came off his bicycle and was fatally impaled on a metal fence. Redfern locals claimed a police car had been stalking the boy. While the aftershocks of the riot were still happening, crudely chalked bodies appeared on Newtown pavements, accompanied by slogans such as ‘Stop racist police brutality’, ‘Cops kill children’, and ‘To kill an Aboriginal is to kill history’.

The grim form of a hastily circumscribed corpse is a crime fiction cliché. It is a recognizable image that has been appropriated, not only by social agitators, but by graphic artists everywhere who want to allude to crime or violent death in a metaphorical way. The pudgy, larger-than-life human form has become a regular symbol in our visual vocabulary, so familiar that it is available for parody. Newspaper artists exploit the image to illustrate feature articles. Cyber-crime? A chalked body holding a computer mouse. Car theft? The silhouette on the asphalt of a disappeared car. Advertisers have flogged it to death. Telstra MessageBank? A taped outline of a phone left off the hook by ‘flatmates murdering messages’. iiNet broadband? A forensic investigator drawing round a computer thrown to the ground by its frustrated owner.

The murder-scene outline has caught on as a pop-culture motif despite rarely being used in true police investigations. Old Sydney detectives are adamant that they never drew them, if only because the chalk dust would have contaminated evidence. Archival police photos seldom show them. The body outline is largely a construct of fiction thrillers and television dramas, but it has taken on a life of its own.

Its featureless form captures the essence of the human body – the shell that remains after the soul has departed. It evokes the murderous act but lacks the ugly complications of a real corpse. It is an empty space that allows room for the imagination. A thought bubble where the violent event can be visualised. Or a speech balloon that radical students can fill with slogans.

Although homicide detectives do not draw body outlines, police at motor vehicle accidents do, or at least they used to until fairly recently. Hardy crash investigators joke about the ‘gingerbread men’ spreadeagled at the scene of ‘fatals’, but admit that they were distracting to motorists and distressing for passers-by. These days they spray-paint the scene with esoteric patterns of lines and arrows instead.

But it was their very potential to distress passers-by that prompted traffic authorities to resurrect body outlines for a series of pedestrian safety campaigns around Sydney in the late 1990s. The aim was to scare reckless road-crossers by stencilling a plague of flattened figures at danger spots on roadways. ‘Step safely’ warned the adjacent pavement signs, ‘Think before you cross’.

Newtown being the kind of place it is, it was not long before local culture jammers tampered with these spray-painted silhouettes. They were especially active during the annual Reclaim the Streets demonstration in 1999, when King Street was blocked to traffic and rebellious pedestrians commandeered the roadway. Challenging the safety campaign’s insinuation that pedestrians are responsible for road fatalities, RTS activists reanimated the stencilled corpses with painted hair and eyes, with Mickey Mouse ears and tomahawks. And they filled the empty outlines with slogans like ‘Cars kill’.

Sources

Adams, Cecil, ‘Do crime scene investigators really draw a chalk line around the body?’, The Straight Dope, 13 April 2001.

Campbell, Nerida, Curator, Justice and Police Museum, Sydney, pers.comm. 2005.

Gibson, Ross, University of Technology, Sydney, curator of ‘Crime Scene’ installation, Justice and Police Museum, Sydney, 1999-2000, pers.comm. 2005.

iiNet, ‘Don’t take it out on: your computer’, advertising brochure, c.2008.

Jenkins, Peter, Senior Sergeant, NSW Police Crash Investigation Unit, pers.comm. 2005.

Jones, Quentin, photographs for ‘Steal traps’ article by Bob Jennings, Drive, pp.1, 6-7, Sydney Morning Herald, 8 June 2001.

Members of 30a (Annonymous collective of streat theatre bandots [sic]), pers.comm. September 2005.

‘Photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki’, Gensuikin.

South Sydney Council, ‘J walking: deadly walking’, Babylon Creative postcard, c.1999.

‘Sydney prepares for Forbes Conference and 30A protest’, Wikinews, 30 August 2005.

Telstra, ‘Stop flatmates murdering messages’, AvantCard postcard, 1999.

Tremain, Cathryn, picture for ‘Catch me if you can’ article by James Hall, Next, p.1, Sydney Morning Herald, 11 March 2003.

‘Underbelly [Uncut]’, DVD, Nine Network, Australia, 2008. Walker, Emily, ‘Shadows of death. Atomic bomb hit Hiroshima 60 years ago’, Kalamazoo Gazette, 7 August 2005.

Original publication

Hicks, Megan, ‘Outlines (Watch this space)’, Second Nature, 1, March 2009.

Remembering the museum

1 March 2024

Early last month I visited the Powerhouse Museum on the last day before it closed indefinitely. I perused the 1001 Remarkable Objects exhibition but most of the other galleries had already been gutted. Government obfuscation means that there are conflicting reports on what kind of venue it will turn out to be when and if it reopens. My visit prompted me to look back at several contributions I have made to the written history of this once great Sydney museum.

Protestors’ flier with the Powerhouse Museum in the background, Harris Street, Ultimo, February 2024 (photo Megan Hicks)

Nearly twenty years ago the Powerhouse produced a large and handsome book to celebrate its 125^th anniversary. The authors of its chapters ranged from museum staff to academic historians. The diversity of their topics covered not only the sometimes colourful history of the museum, but the spread of its vast collections, representing as they do science, technology, design, decorative arts and social history.

*Yesterday’s Tomorrows* published in 2005

My colleague Martha Sear and I, both of us curators at the time, wrote a chapter titled ‘Prescribing’ where we followed the museum’s intermittent efforts to encourage health and hygiene amongst the general populace. Indeed its first name was the Technological, Industrial and Sanitary Museum. Original exhibits included an arrangement of sanitary appliances, such as toilets, sinks, ventilators and pipes, for the instruction of tradesmen and householders.

From the early educational displays of human bones and papier-mâché anatomical models as well as plumbing, through the eugenically ideal Transparent Plastic Woman of the 1950s, the confused 1980s Mind and Body gallery, and on to exhibitions about contraception in the 1990s and sustainable futures in the early 2000s, Martha and I found a common philosophy underpinning the museum’s intentions in its health and hygiene displays.

We concluded that, despite changes in its name, site, and governance, and despite the evolution of international museum trends, the Powerhouse and its precursors had always assumed an admonitory role in those displays. That is, it insisted that visitors were responsible for managing their own health, and it showed them what it regarded as the means to make informed choices about how to achieve that.

Transparent ‘Chocka Bits’, modelling an array of medical implants, went on display in the *Mind and Body* gallery, which opened in the new Powerhouse Museum in 1989. Although it was fabricated as an exhibition prop it was accessioned into the museum’s collection in 2004. The anonymous author of the entry in the museum’s catalogue wrote candidly and poignantly, ‘Chocka Bits has been retained for two reasons. Firstly, it is a tangible link to an exciting period in medicine when implant and transplant science and technology burgeoned. Secondly, it is also a link to an equally exciting period for museums, when the Powerhouse was at the forefront, both in Australia and internationally, of innovative approaches to exhibition technology and techniques’ (2004/112/1 Display figure ‘Chocka Bits’. Commissioned by the Powerhouse Museum 1989. Photograph Ryan Hernandez)

But even though the purview of Yesterday’s Tomorrows was wide, I was disappointed that the book gave little attention to the viewpoint of visitors. Once our chapter had been signed off I saw the opportunity to go on and fill a research gap. Across the world few studies had been made of people’s experiences of museum visits made before the 1980s, which is when the field of visitor evaluation emerged.

With encouragement from Bruce Hayllar at the University of Technology Sydney I conducted a series of interviews with people who remembered visiting the Technological Museum (as the Powerhouse was then known) as children or teenagers between 1935 and 1969. Over those decades the museum suffered from lack of funds and its didactic and overcrowded exhibits barely changed.

The Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (popularly known as the Technological Museum) in Harris Street, Ultimo, in the 1950s. It is not far from the site of the present Powerhouse Museum (State Library of NSW)

I do not have much of a following as a researcher/writer but, of all the articles and chapters I have published, my study of young people’s experiences of the Technological Museum is my most cited work. That’s probably because there are – or were – more students and researchers interested in visitor studies then there are aficionados of pavements and pavement graffiti. Nevertheless I thank Bruce Hayllar for prodding me into making this a much better article than it might otherwise have been.

By taking a phenomenological approach to the interviewees’ fragmentary long-term recollections I was able to capture an insight into the lived experience of museum visits from a young person’s perspective. I concluded that there were three themes characterizing their experiences. These were City Life, Adulthood and Independent Discovery. Linking these three themes was the fundamental experience of Growing Up. For young people of the period 1930- 1970, visits to the Technological Museum contributed to their transition from childhood to adulthood.

For a retrospective visitor study of a museum that was at the time old-fashioned by world standards, that was a pretty remarkable finding.

A young person pores over a model of an engine in the Technological Museum in 1957 (State Library of NSW)

References:

SCORRANO, Armanda (2006) (Book review) Yesterday’s Tomorrows: the Powerhouse Museum and its precursors 1880-2005 [etc ]. Public History Review, 12, 111-113.

DAVISON, Graeme & WEBBER, Kimberley (Eds.) (2005) Yesterday’s Tomorrows: the Powerhouse Museum and its Precursors 1880-2005, Sydney, Powerhouse Publishing with UNSW Press.

HICKS, Megan & SEAR, Martha (2005) Prescribing: salutary instruction at the museum. In WEBBER, K. & DAVIDSON, G. (Eds.) (2005).

HICKS, Megan (2005) A whole new world: the young person’s experience of visiting Sydney Technological Museum. Museum & Society, 3, 66-80.

Rainbow politics

4 June 2016

“The removal of the Taylor Square rainbow crossing created an even bigger stir than its original installation. To mark its passing, people attached unofficial rainbow flags to poles in Taylor Square and tied rainbow ribbons to safety fences. But performer and activist James Brechney had a fresh idea for an alternate location that somehow captured the zeitgeist.”

My exquisitely objective article on the history of the DIY Rainbow Crossing is now available to read in the Dictionary of Sydney.

Some time ago I wrote a blog post on the symbolism of pedestrian crossings. It’sÂ here.

(Photos by meganix, taken in Darlinghurst in 2013 and Summer Hill 2015)

Asphalt rules

2 May 2015

Man in the moon, Broadway Shopping Centre car park (Sydney), April 2015 (photo: meganix)

Today is the anniversary of the launch of this blog. It was on 3 May 2009 that I wrote the first post and welcomed readers to Pavement Graffiti, “where asphalt rules and grey is good. The focus is on roadways and footpaths, and â€˜graffitiâ€™ means anything written, drawn, scrawled or stencilled on them”.

Centennial Park labyrinth (Sydney), November 2014 (photo: meganix)

Back then I had embarked on a PhD at Macquarie University, also titled Pavement Graffiti. Six years on, the PhD has been achieved, there is a gallery of images on-line at Pavement Appreciation and a Facebook page of the same name, academic articles have been published, magazine articles too. From time to time journalists stumble upon the blog and ask my opinion about graffiti, Eternity or, as happened this week, walkable cities. The blog does not have a huge following but I am grateful to those who have given long-standing support or have simply shown aÂ fleeting interest.

‘Happy BDay Lolz Grace’, Watsons Bay (Sydney), December 2014 (photo: meganix)

My interests have broadened to encompass a concern for the disappearance of strange spaces, areas of decay, and layered sites under the pressure of urban renewal (or urban homogenization). I am now an Adjunct Fellow of the Urban Research Centre at the University of Western Sydney.

‘Go vegan’, Queen Victoria Building (Sydney), October 2014 (photo: meganix)

But I still retain my fascination for the pavement and am currently waiting to hear if my article on ‘Imagining the pavement: a search through everyday texts for the symbolism of an everyday artefact’ has been accepted for publication. Watch this space.

‘I love same sex love’, Sydney Park, St Peters, February 2015 (photo: meganix)

And do, please, continue to enjoy the literary adventure of reading the street beneath your feet.

Tributes outside site of Martin Place siege (Sydney), December 2014 (photo: meganix)

Asphalt and umbrellas

8 October 2014

This week I have been thinking about the role the pavement can play in our thoughts and feelings about particular places and times in our lives. Long after the Hong Kong pro-democracy protest is over, and whatever the outcome, the gritty surface of the city’s public spaces will figure largely in the memories of the people who took part. The asphalt has been a major player in the drama of the so-called Umbrella Revolution.

Slate.com

NBC News

The Telegraph (UK)

Global Grind

Protestors themselves remove slogans and graffiti from the street. Getty Images

No parking

23 June 2014

Enmore, 2014.

This is a story about the struggle between the green and the grey, between leaves and asphalt, between street trees and street parking, between what ought to be and what is. In inner city suburbs like Enmore and Stanmore,Â Marrickville Council is caught in this struggle.

One of the most stressful aspects of urban living is the shortage of parking. Suburbs that sprang up in the Victorian era, when there was no such thing as a motor car, are now undergoing gentrification; households often have more than one car but few houses have off-street parking.

Given the convenience of public transport in area, why do these people need cars? Partly it’s snobbery. Does your solicitor join the plebs on a bus to work? Would your doctor be seen dead in a train? Partly it’s necessity. With both parents working, try juggling work hours, childcare drop-offs and pick-ups, and Saturday sport all over the city. However much people might agree in principle with the environmental benefits of public transport and bicycle riding, often these are just not viable options.

Stanmore, 2014.

Shortage of street parking spaces is made worse by visitors to the area. Now that Enmore has become a ‘vibrant entertainment precinct’ hundreds of customers come in the evenings to attend performances or enjoy the many new restaurants, bars and cafes. And they don’t necessarily want to travel across the city in public transport at night to get home. So they infiltrate ever-deeper into residential territory to find parking for their cars. Residents jealously guard driveways (if they have them) and fume when they have to park blocks away from their homes. Marrickville Council knows all this and is trying to address the problem with committee meetings, surveys, community consultation, plans and projects.

Enmore, 2014. Enmore Theatre is in the background.

So why is Council intent on reducing the amount of parking in contested areas, rather than finding extra spaces? It’s because they are also committed to an Urban Forest Strategy that ‘recognizes the urban forest as an essential, living infrastructure asset and resource that provides a wide range of social, environmental and economic benefits’.

And this is what has prompted the demonstration project in Cavendish Street, Enmore, where large Lilli Pilli trees have been planted in structured soil in the roadway. I wrote about this project in my earlier post ‘What lies beneath’. And even though ‘permeable paving’ means that the space taken up by tree-planting ‘blisters’ is smaller than would normally be needed to keep trees healthy, there is no question that parking spaces have been lost. Residents of the street are supposed to have agreed to this arrangement, but they probably would have agreed to any scheme that saw the former huge, inappropriate and destructive fig trees removed from their footpaths.

Enmore, 2014. One tree gained, two parking spaces lost.

Meanwhile parking pressure on nearby streets has been increased just that bit extra. What’s more, Marrickville’s draft Master Street Plan has Lilli Pilli (Waterhousia floribunda) or similarly large trees slated for some of these same streets. Given the narrowness of the verges, this must mean more in-road planting and more parking lost. Residents of these streets are not going to be too happy about this.

A 2013 survey of residents in the Marrickville Local Government Area found that most people like having greenery in their suburbs. Of course. But what the survey doesn’t mention is that householders also like to park close to their homes and businesses don’t want customers put off by lack of parking. Until a whole lot of things in the world change, this reliance on cars and the need for parking isn’t going to go away. In-road planting is an impractical component of the urban forest strategy and would have measurable social and economic costs. An ideological commitment to such a component would have a detrimental, not a beneficial, effect on the local area. Small trees, please.

Enmore, 2014.

Body outlines

29 October 2013

The 1950-60s television courtroom drama, Perry Mason, is said to have been the first detective show to feature either a tape or a chalk outline to mark the spot where a murder victim’s body had been found. The body outline made its first appearance in the episode ‘The case of the perjured parrot’. The writer of the show, Erle Stanley Gardner, had actually used this idea much earlier in the book, ‘Double or quits, which he wrote in 1941 under the pen name A.A.Fair (see Perry Mason TV series).

Ever since then the body outline has not only been used regularly in murder stories and television shows, but it is very often adaptively reused in illustrations alluding to all sorts of crime and fatality. It is a symbol — based on a fiction — Â that is continually modified, re-invented and re-purposed. We recognise it in newspaper cartoons, TV commercials and political protests and we understand what is meant.

In New York I came across two instances of the symbolic body outline, both associated with the New York Public Library. The first was in an exhibition, Why we fight: remembering AIDS activism, which recently opened at Â the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. One of the exhibits was this poster from the library’s archives. It was produced in 1988 by ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), a deliberately confrontational organisation that was formed to challenge government inaction over AIDS.

The other body outline was on one of the plaques along the section of 41st Street known as Library Way. These sidewalk plaques carry inspirational quotes about reading, writing, and literature. The one I photographed reads:

… a great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it. William Styron (1935 – Â ), Writers at Work.

To me, the embossedÂ illustration on the plaque seems very odd. The reader of the book looks, not exhausted, but dead (presumably in a hiatus between two of those ‘several lives’).

Tax Wall Street

28 September 2013

On 42nd Street, near the New York Public Library, I spotted fresh chalk notices. Of course I had to photograph them even though I didn’t get a chance to read them properly because it was the evening rush hour and the sidewalks were crowded with people on their way home from work.

Then I noticed there were more police about than usual and suddenly I realised there was a protest march coming down the avenue, timed to disrupt the maximum number of people. Marchers were confined to the sidewalk and were accompanied by a phalanx of police motor cycles in the kerbside traffic lane. It was quite a sight.

The issue was the ‘Robin Hood Tax’ or, more properly, a Financial Speculation (or Transaction) Tax. Supporters of such a tax maintain it is a way to raise funds to meet human needs, like protecting public services, tackling poverty and dealing with climate change. The date was 17 September, the two-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street.

It was good to see a strong showing from Occupy Wall Street. The previous weekend a small group claiming to be Occupy Wall Street was occupying space amongst all the weekend goings-on in Union Square. Their presence was not very impressive.

The symbolism of pedestrian crossings

18 April 2013

In built-up areas the pedestrian crossing is a familiar feature of the horizontal signscape. William Phelps Eno, sometimes known as the â€˜father of traffic safetyâ€™ is credited with introducing the cross-walk to New York streets in the early 1900s. Once motorized vehicles became popular, something had to be done to protect pedestrians from reckless drivers.

Sydney was one of many cities that soon followed suit. As early as 1912 lines were painted on the road at busy Circular Quay to provide a safe crossing area.Â Within a few years designated pedestrian crossings in the rest of the city were being marked out with metal studs or pairs of white lines. Designs for crossings have continued to change over the years.

$A stopping line at the intersection of Market and Pitts Streets in Sydney, marked out with metal studs, 1929 (City of Sydney Archives photograph, SRC7806, file 034\034213).$

A stopping line at the intersection of Market and Pitts Streets in Sydney, marked out with metal studs, 1929 (City of Sydney Archives photograph, SRC7806, file 034\034213).

For some people, pedestrian crossings represent order, civilization and safety. For others they represent repression and regimentation of peopleâ€™s behaviour.

Fake pedestrian crossing, â€˜Design saves livesâ€™, an entrant in the Eye Saw exhibition in Omnibus Lane, Ultimo during Sydney Design Week, 2006 (photo by meganix).

Fanciful pedestrian crossing, â€˜Design saves livesâ€™, an entrant in the Eye Saw exhibition in Omnibus Lane, Ultimo during Sydney Design Week, 2006 (photo by meganix).

Some pedestrian crossings have achieved iconic status. The most famous is the crossing featured on the cover of the Beatleâ€™s 1969 LP Abbey Road. Photographed by thousands of fans and tourists emulating the Fab Four crossing the road near their recording studio in single file, this â€˜modest structureâ€™ (to quote an official of English Heritage) has been given heritage listing for its â€˜cultural and historical importanceâ€™.

The original photograph has been recently used in a pedestrian safety campaign in the Indian City of Calcutta.

Road safety poster using Ian Macmillanâ€™s famous 1969 photograph, issued by the Kolkata [Calcutta] Traffic Police in February 2013.

And then thereâ€™s the Rainbow Crossing at Taylor Square in Sydneyâ€™s gay precinct of Darlinghurst. When it was removed by the State Government some people were glad, with one newspaper letter-writer declaring that â€˜compulsory pieces of public infrastructure should not force upon pedestrians political views which contravene their religious or moral conscienceâ€™.

The disappeared Rainbow Crossing at Taylor Square and a notice about a rally for marriage equality, April 2013 (photo by meganix).

However such views were drowned out by the groundswell of outrage that manifested itself in the DIY Rainbow Crossing protest. It is significant that this is all going on at the same time as the parliament of Australiaâ€™s neighbour Â New Zealand had done what no Australian government will do and legalised same-sex marriage.

A painted DIY Rainbow Crossing in Jones Street, Ultimo (Sydney), April 2013 (photo by meganix).

Mind you, as Lawrence Gibbons in City News points out, having created a public relations coup with the DIY Rainbow Crossings, Lord Mayor Clover Moore is left with a dilemma. Under policies implemented during her nine-year tenure, any street art, graffiti or posters in the City of Sydney must be removed from any highly visible site within twenty four hours. Under this ruling, the councilâ€™s scrubbing machines should be out there right now removing the rainbows.

A colourful story

15 April 2013

This is a story about vindictiveness and vindication. On the face of it, itâ€™s about gay pride and support for the gay and lesbian (LGBTQI) community. But itâ€™s also about me, me, me and my Pavement graffiti project.

It all started with a pedestrian crossing at Taylor Square on Oxford Street that the City of Sydney Council painted in rainbow colours for the 2013 Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras in February-March. It was supposed to be temporary but Sydneysiders wanted it to stay.

Rainbow crossing, Taylor Square, Sydney, March 2013

The State Government declared it was a safety hazard and during the night on 10 April it sent in a crew to rip up the rainbow and repave the road. This is where the vindictiveness comes in. Many people saw this action as part of an ongoing campaign by Â State Premier Barry O’Farrell to â€˜Get Cloverâ€™ â€“ Clover Moore, that is, the longstanding Lord Mayor of Sydney. Asphalt used as a political weapon. Hereâ€™s a newspaper report and video of the dastardly deed.

Rainbow crossing at Taylor Square replaced by grey asphalt, April 2013

By the end of the week there were rainbow ribbons and flags flying around Taylor Square to mark the passing of the crossing.

Memorial rainbow ribbons, Taylor Square, 14 April 2013

But even more astounding, in protest against the Government’s action, a viral campaign to draw DIY rainbow crossings in chalk took off in Sydney, around Australia, and in other parts of the world.

DIY rainbow crossing, Forbes Street, just a few metres from Taylor Square, 14 April 2013

Around where I live you canâ€™t walk up the street without tripping over a rainbow.

Rainbow crossing outside Goulds Book Arcade, King Street, Newtown, 14 April 2013

And this is the vindication part. â€˜Pavement graffitiâ€™ may seem like an obscure and even unworthy subject on which to base a PhD and many people just donâ€™t get it. But in the very week that I finish writing the thesis, along comes this hotly debated story to demonstrate that PAVEMENT MARKS MATTER. (Itâ€™s also left me wondering whether I should open up the thesis again and add an epilogue about rainbow crossings.)

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